Sculpture Talk with artist Patrick Cruz

Patrick Cruz is an artist, educator, and albularyo who considers the role of spirituality, improvisation, intuition, and play as emancipatory tools to reify embedded colonial frameworks and ideologies in art making. Cruz employs meditation, divination, and hypnosis as research methodologies to exhume and retrieve hidden knowledge. His works are informed by the intersections of clown philosophy, magic, and the occult, and its syncretic manifestations and relationship in contemporary life. Most recently, Cruz has been making works using material retrieved from past-life regressions to navigate and side-step cultural and ancestral identity.

In 2021, he received the prestigious Thirteen Artist Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines and won the national title for the 17th RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2015. He is an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at the University of Toronto Scarborough and Daniels Campuses. He is the founder and co-director of the Kamias Triennial, co-curator of Ben Flores Fan Club Collective with Christian Vistan, collaborator at Boring Earth with Laila Fox, and one of the 19 members of the artist-run collective the Plumb.

The Sculpture Talk lecture series invites contemporary artists to York University to share and discuss recent projects, working methodologies, and materialities. These talks are free of charge and open to all. Presented by the Department of Visual Arts and Art History in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design and generously sponsored by the LL Odette Foundation.

Images:

Patrick Cruz, Bathala (detail), bamboo, wood, paraffin wax, metal, pearl, abalone shells, clam shells, oyster shells, thread, 2023

Patrick Cruz, Bathala (detail), bamboo, wood, paraffin wax, metal, pearl, abalone shells, clam shells, oyster shells, thread, 2023